Thrilling the Reader Within

I think every writer is a person who wants to impress the reader within themselves. Anyone who wants to tell a story has been a person who has read other peoples tales and been filled with amazement at the magic simple black shapes on a page can form words that can alter a person forever.

By my own recollection, I have been a reader all my life. Some of the best Christmas presents my mother ever gave me were piles of books, tall misshapen packages, wrapped in decorative paper ready to be ripped open by my eager hands. There are pictures of me on birthday mornings celebrating another year of my life, engrossed in a new book. Weekly trips to the library punctate my memories. I love the smell, the feel of a new book in my hands. I love the promise a new book holds for a reader. Within the pages of a book, you can go on a journey to anywhere, at any time and learn any number of things. And from a young age, I too wanted to be part of the magic that I believed an author was part of when they wrote a book.

If a person writes words that nobody reads, can they still call themselves a writer?

Like all writer wannabes, I use my diary and my blog to practise the craft of writing. I may pretend that, to all intensive purposes, I really don't care whether people read my entries. I may pretend that I am writing a record of my life for me to enjoy in years to come. And to a certain extent, its true. I love going back over my diary to the start of my writing journey to see how far and what I have learnt from life so far. But there is another, possibly more selfish reason I write and put my words up on public display in cyber space. To deny this would be to lie. I put my words up for the world to see because I yearn for the encouragement from other people. I long to gain praise for the way I have strung words together to make my meaning clear to others. I want to be told that I do have a gift, that I'm not kidding myself that eventually, with perseverance and a thick skin, I too will see my name in print as a by line. That my stories will be written on thick creamy paper bound together in the wonderful tablet form of a book that will have my name on the spine.

But as naturally as writing appears to come to some, for me, the continual ease of writing often remains elusive. Certainly there are days when my fingers seem to fly over the keyboard, the words rise up out of my soul in the effortlessness of a bird in flight. There are days however, when pulling the words out of my head and getting my fingers to translate the thoughts onto the keys of the keyboard is much like watching a one year old child learning to feed themselves spaghetti. In their determination to do “me do”, you end up with noodles all over the family room floor, in their hair, down their clothes and (if your lucky) in the tummies of two ever hungry, helpful and happy to oblige dachshunds. My writing is messy, my thoughts jumbled and my ego battered as I come to the realisation that I still have a way to go in learning to fulfil the artistic call of my soul.

To this end I have, some would say finally, enrolled in my first writing workshop. I'm not sure what to expect exactly, but the mere fact I have put my hand up to a stranger in the real world and admitted that I too want to join the ranks of ‘writers’ has been a journey of discovering courage for me. I have finally acknowledged that what I really long to do is write and see my name in a library catalogue and a book shop shelf. This Sunday I will meet a real life author Cath Crowley who has two published books and a play accounted to her name.

I hope to learn (or even just catch a fragment or two) of her wisdom on how to turn ideas into actual chapters with characters that hold a reader spellbound. I want to learn how to get past the annoying 3000 word boundary that I strike so often, unsure of how to take my tale to the next place, despite knowing the story I want to weave. I want to walk away and believe that I too, can use the title writer and that the words I write will thrill the reader within me.